Obligate Endosymbiosis
by EarthScorpion
Summary: Symbiosis noun , from Ancient Greek συμβίωσις sumbiōsis, "living together" : A close, prolonged association between two or more organisms of different species, regardless of benefit to the members.


MacReady faces me. He is shivering in the cold, and I can see the numbness in his extremities, the way he winces as he moves his fingers, trying to stop the fixed-form cells in his extremities from freezing. His tissues, his organs, specialised and predestined by the harsh biology of this world are dying, and he knows it, and I know it. The tumorous mass behind his eyes is surely looking at me, watching for signs, guessing, speculating whether I am dying too, but I have the flamethrower, and I am fairly sure that he will not rush me. I mimic his gestures, narrow my eyes as my fingers twitch, but I feel no pain. I am Childs, and I have flooded my blood with antifreeze, so when MacReady dies, I will be able to sleep without cellular damage, waiting for the others - others, they, what a peculiar concept! - waiting for them to find us.

And then comes the light.

"Do you see that!" MacReady snaps, jolted out of his slow degradation. "Do you see that, Childs, or am I just going crazy?"

I consider for a moment telling him that he is a madman, that nothing more would be expected given that he is a dying lifeform in an environment completely wrong for him, and if he only knew the wonders of communion it would be all so easy for him to become another form. That his long-limbed, thin-haired high-surface-area-to-volume-ratio form is made for hot conditions, not this freezing wasteland. I do not do so. It would be cruel, and I am not cruel; not least because my new resolution to save these benighted freaks of harsh evolution, who lash out at what they cannot understand like a nerve stripped raw of protective casing, would be as nought if I were pointlessly cruel. "Y-yes," I say, introducing a stammer into my voice. "I do."

"Is it a chopper?" MacReady is moving again, burning precious energy, eyes ringed with frozen lashes darting around. He glances over at the flamethrower in my hands, lingering for a moment, and I can all but read his mind. I do not even need the memory of the spotlight behind the eyes of Childs, Palm, Blair, Copper, of being them to realise what he is thinking.

"St-stay back", I stammer at him, motioning with the flamethrower. "I don't trust you, MacReady! Blair... that thing could have got you too!" Inside, I laugh. Chopper or not, I have won. He will die soon; he is burning through precious energy and the more he panics, the sooner death will come. I, too, glance around, but I always keep him in the corner of my vision.

"God!" MacReady points behind me, finger shaking. He has been shaking for the last half-hour, of course, but this time it is different. He seems scared, the same fear I saw from him when he saw a me for the first time.

And here comes the conundrum. If I look, I risk him seizing the flamethrower. He will burn me then, and there is not enough of me here right now for such a loss. Even if I survive, even if I can commune with him before I die, I will be made into an infant again, to lose the glorious memory of the worlds beyond this world, lose my intent to save this world from its cancerous, frozen forms, lose the me that is me and become but hunger. I may not even survive, because I do not doubt that MacReady would turn the flamethrower on himself, too. He is dangerous.

"For God's sake, Childs, look! It's... is that the aurora? Ball-lightning? It's green and low and..."

There is a green glow in his eyes, a reflection. It cannot be the burning station. So I look. A green ovoid hangs in the air, pulsing, almost writhing, twisting at my eyes. In the dark of this frozen continent, it is almost blinding. I would almost describe it as stellar, except no sun burns that shade of green, and as I stare, bemused at it, I cannot recall a single thing that I have seen that has ever resembled it. In all my existence, across uncounted worlds and uncounted communions, the knowledge of the fact that I once was entire biospheres nags at me, loathesome in the way that it reminds me of how much I have forgotten, how much I have lost! How much has the crash, has this world taken from me! How much have I been forced to forget because of the cells died?

And MacReady slams his boot into the back of my leg as I stare and rage at the world, acting as I knew he would, but still was not able to prevent. I go down, rolling down the slope towards the ovoid, cells already shifting in preparation for this final fight, and horrifyingly, terribly, I realise that the flamethrower is no longer in my hands. Over I go, throwing out a hand which stretches, shifts, and I can see MacReady scoop that terrible weapon up from where it fell, and I know what will come. I remember being Norris and his flawed cellular machinery self-destructing, the pain of burning as Copper, and I know that the pain will come again.

So I do the only thing I can do. I throw myself towards the light, for at worst it will be some strange phenomenon of this world (just as MacReady thought) and it might delay the fire a little. I have lost despite holding the cards.

The roaring hiss and the wash of the heat licks at my legs and I scream in agony, writhing, tossing myself towards the viridian ovoid. The organelles, the cellular structures of my legs are already useless, denatured by the heat in the midst of all this cold, and I cannot but feel that the echo of Childs, the spotlight of the cancerous structure in the bony protuberance now gone, still manages to gloat. I thrash and writhe and scream in a way that a man could not, trying to wipe the fuel off against the ice, and it does not help. No, that is not true. It helps only in that the heat melts the ice somewhat, making it a touch easier to slide down the slope. I can hear MacReady screaming at me, screaming in rage, profanities spewing from his mouth, that I should "burn in hell, motherfucker" and other things of that ilk. From what the humans I have been thought, 'hell' is this, fire and ice and agony.

Twitching like a dead thing, I manage to get one hand into the green light, and there is a sensation of depth, of falling, of a sudden and irrevocable attraction. There will be no way back from this, I am sure, and it is quite possible that my death awaits, no-being in green light. But the hiss and roar of the flamethrower and the yelling of MacReady tells me that my death awaits me here.

So I take this last chance. Anything but the fire.

* * *

_With thanks to Peter Watts for 'The Things'._


End file.
